During this first session my maiden speech was upon the governor's message, and I did my best to show what I thought His Excellency's shortcomings. Governor Seymour was a patriotic man, after his fashion, but the one agency which he regarded as divinely inspired was the Democratic party; his hatred of the Lincoln Administration was evidently deep, and it was also clear that he did not believe that the war for the Union could be brought to a successful termination. With others I did my best against him; but while condemning his political course as severely as was possible to me, I never attacked his personal character or his motives. The consequence was that, while politically we were enemies, personally a sort of friendship remained, and I recall few things with more pleasure than my journeyings from Albany up the Mohawk Valley, sitting at his side, he giving accounts to me of the regions through which we passed, and the history connected with them, regarding which he was wonderfully well informed. If he hated New England as the breeding bed of radicalism, he loved New York passionately. The first important duty imposed upon me as chairman of the committee on education was when there came up a bill for disposing of the proceeds of public lands appropriated by the government of the United States to institutions for scientific and technical education, under what was then known as the Morrill Act of 1862. Of these lands the share which had come to New York was close upon a million acres--a fair-sized European principality. Here, owing to circumstances which I shall detail in another chapter, I found myself in a contest with Mr. Cornell. I favored holding the fund together, letting it remain with the so-called ``People's College,'' to which it had been already voted, and insisted that the matter was one to be referred to the committee on education. Mr. Cornell, on the other hand, favored the division of the fund, and proposed a bill giving one half of it to the ``State Agricultural College'' recently established at Ovid on Seneca Lake. The end was that the matter was referred to a joint committee composed of the committees on literature and agriculture, that is, to Mr. Cornell's committee and my own, and as a result no meeting to consider the bill was held during that session.